Nature & Animals Quote by Mordecai Wyatt Johnson

In a single sly turn, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson smuggles a radical idea into a homespun observation: family is usually fate, but a dog is kin by consent. The line works because it treats “relative” not as biology or paperwork but as a moral category - someone whose claims on you are real, ongoing, and intimate. A dog doesn’t just live in your house; it reorganizes your daily life, your money, your schedule, your sense of responsibility. That’s what relatives do. Johnson’s choice of “acquiring” is telling too: it nods to the transactional reality (you adopt, you purchase, you take possession) and then immediately undercuts it by elevating the relationship into something sacramental. You think you’re getting a pet; you end up getting family.

As an educator and public figure working in an era when institutions were obsessed with lineage, legitimacy, and “proper” household structures, Johnson is quietly tugging at the seams of social inheritance. Many people never get to pick the people who shape them most - parents, siblings, the community that names them. But choosing a dog is a rare moment of elective attachment: you decide who enters your life, and then you live with the consequences.

The subtext is both tender and chastening. If we can choose a relative once, why do we act as if care is only owed where blood demands it? The joke lands, then lingers as a critique of how narrowly we define belonging.